LS - You're probably right.... We're slowly moving toward SaaS and "light"
clients. There may be a backlash though. Large companies might look at CapEx
vs. OpEx, but for most companies and people, cash is king. And most people
don't want more and more monthly charges.

I still think the obvious win, at least for larger organizations with IT departments
and/or specific security needs, is a set of easy-to-deploy applications that
enable the thin client model on your own servers. Google Apps and Office
365 are geared towards putting everything on Google Drive or OneDrive. A
lot of organizations want to be liberated from the hassles of supporting "fat"
clients, but aren't thrilled about shipping out the server tasks.

Look at the popularity of OwnCloud. People *love* that thing, and it doesn't
really do all that much.

LibreOffice has something like that too, but it's really just the existing
application being rendered through a browser window. I can see advantages
and disadvantages of doing it that way vs. writing an HTML-based renderer.

And I think Office 365 would have less uptake if Microsoft wasn't deliberately
making Exchange so hard
to install that it takes a small army of MCSE's and no fewer than six servers
to support even the smallest organization.

If you're building a brand new company today, you're doing it in the cloud,
to the extent feasible. You're going to use a Gmail-hosted domain for all
your email, Exchange will be irrelevant because you have Google Calendar.
You have Google Drive sharing as a poor-man's substitute for Sharepoint or
whateverthefuck you used to use. I probably shouldn't say poor-man's because
although I don't know much about Sharepoint, I never saw of it as much more
of a glorified file server.

You have:

PagerDuty as the last-mile of your monitoring-and-alerting solution
Expensify or Concur for receipts
Even iDoneThis for timesheets - perhaps

You will use hosted Jira for *everything* - there's a whole development ecosystem
here:
- hosted Elastic Bamboo for builds
- Jira for tasks and time sheets
- Confluence for your Wiki
- Bitbucket
for your Git server
All 4 of the above are hosted, you are not installing anything on your own
infrastructure.

We have *nothing* on our own physical infrastructure. We have a Wifi router.
That's it. We used to have a little Linux box that was built to power flat
panel display monitors that run stuff that makes us look cool. That has been
decomissioned since the latest office move.

Of course, you still need Macbooks. It is not yet possible to do software
development on an iPad.

Nor do we have anything deployed in a traditional "colocation" provider.
Every box we run is on hardware that is provisioned with mouse clicks.

We have use hosted Newrelic for server monitoring.

there are a few legacy-ish things that I want to get rid of that are not
"hosted", that are instead built out on EC2 deployments. There's an LDAP server
that
was a mistake, that will go away if I can ever find the time to make it disappear.
There's an indispensable Splunk installation that is not "hosted" in the normal
sense: we still manage its infrastructure by managing the EC2 box that hosts
it.

Some of these things are more pricey than we would like. But there is at
least one head that we do not have to employ that we would otherwise have
to employ, and our infrastructure investment is more *predictable*, which
may ultimately trump low cost.

We do not have any IT staff. None. Only developers. And it's starting to
feel like a mid-size company.

Jira (et al) is actually a pretty good example of what I was trying to point out. Atlassian offers the software as a service *or* as a set of applications you can install on your own server. Some customers are going to choose the maintenance-free, pay-forever model. Others are going to choose the some-maintenance, pay-once model. Kudos to Atlassian for giving customers the choice. I think that's the right way to go.

What "your own server" looks like has already changed, of course. The dusty box in the closet is already long gone.

I don't know much about Sharepoint, I never saw of it as much more of a glorified file server.

Sharepoint has NO USEFUL PURPOSE. It is nothing more than a wiki that can only handle attachments, no text.

I've been through a couple of mergers now where everyone has a wiki, everyone prefers their wiki, but the direction is to move everything over to Sharepoint. Because Sharepoint. No particularly good reason. That kind of thinking is the only reason Sharepoint gets used at all.

That goes along the line of "the reason for exchange is outlook" and "the reason for outlook is office business/pro"

I sadly have only two reasonable clients that use thunderbird. All other use Outlook, despite of all the shortcomings.

And yes, all your cloud models that are free now will probably introduce a fee at one point. Sugar sync did that, I replaced it with Seafile. Dyndns did that, and I think that was one of the dirtiest stunts ever pulled on the internet. Luckily, there are enough alternatives. Oh, and for google services, you are already paying with your privacy.

The have a lovely list of domains to choose from and should be supported by ddclient (in a recent enough version or with a patch, I do not remember). The service is supported by my router, so I stopped worrying.